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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Once again, the wringing of hands, the brow-wrinkling
concern, the dire prognosticators decrying stores that opened their doors on Thanksgiving
night.Outrageous! thunders The Church-of-TV-Punditry-Gasbags.We’re destroying our American Values, we’re
being overtaken by soul-eating commercialism!Halloween’s barely over, the Kandy Korn is still stuck in our teeth, and
here come the Christmas decorations and Big Sale door-busters! Is nothing sacred anymore?

Ah, but we Americans do love our fake nostalgia.In all our heads we carry the dream of The
Great American Tradition – The Perfect Thanksgiving, straight out of Hollywood
and a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, the family gathered around the huge white
linen-covered table, Granny bringing in the perfect turkey.The warm sun is pouring into the dining room
through lace curtains.Uncle Fred and
Aunt Sarah and Mom and Dad are there.Little Timmy and Tammy are all brushed up, their unruly cowlicks laying
flat, nice and clean in their Sunday best and are gathered around, eyes on the
turkey, tummies rumbling with anticipation.

Soon, the feast will begin, the soft voices of a family
sharing stories and decorous laughter rising above the clink of silverware on
china.And when all are replete, the
family will retire to the parlor to spend the rest of the lazy Autumn day
chatting or playing board games while the men folk doze in the big armchairs
and the women folk share gossip and do the washing up.Later, the kids will go out to play some
touch football on the lawn. And towards evening, everyone will take a few
moments to think about what a great country they live in and how important it
is to spend family time together, and how much they all have to be thankful
for.

Right.

In the real world, the busy family stopped eating together
years ago.It’s been food-on-the-fly for
ages, and if they were forced to sit at table together for more than 10
minutes, everyone would consider that to be a cruel torture.At some point, even Granny stopped cooking on
the holidays years ago (“I did Thanksgiving for 30 years and I’m not doing it
anymore.”), the family’s gone vegan and that’s a Tofurky on the table. Uncle
Fred’s fallen off the wagon and is now face down in the mashed potatoes. Aunt Sarah is hissing at him (“I could have
married a doctor years ago, but Nooo, I had to go and marry you!”). Timmy and Tammy are sullenly
slouched down in their chairs, their noses buried in their iPhones and furiously
texting their friends, wishing to God they were somewhere – anywhere else than
here (“OMG! This sucks! What R U doing?”), while Dad has escaped to the living
room with his buddies and they’re parked in front of the big screen TV watching
football and drinking beer.

In short, dinner’s over in a flash and the family is bored
silly and desperate to get away from each other as fast as possible.And what better way to do that but head to
the mall?

It’s the perfect combination: The atomized family, adrift
from old fashioned tradition and rigid social restraints, desperate for
constant stimulation and entertainment, all gleefully swimming in the vast American
Sea of Mass Consumption.

So starting the new tradition of a Mall ThanksChristgiving seems
like a winner.No need to spend boring
time with one another, there’s plenty of excitement and novelty for everyone,
tons of instant gratification provided by credit cards, and if anyone misses
the thrill of violence formerly provided by football games, consider the recent
WalMart/BestBuy riots, the wonderful real-time thrill of dangerous crowd crush,
head-butts, elbow-slams, and even gunshots from armed shoppers.

So I say to the gasbag decriers of the death of
tradition:Zip it.Americans are always re-inventing their
traditions.It’s what we do. Norman
Rockwell’s dead. Get over it. Time for a new holiday: The Great Winter
Buy-A-Thon.

That’s when, on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, Americans of
all ages, will gather together, credit cards securely tucked into their pockets
right next to the Glock and their smart phones, a backpack full of turkey
sandwiches slung over their shoulders, (O Pioneers!) and head with their fellow
Americans to the Malls of America for one of two glorious days of shopping and
shooting togetherness, a spectacular blow-out of happily harvesting vast
quantities ofunnecessary crap that will
end up in the landfill come January 1st.

5 comments:

I feel almost unAmerican. We didn't rush to the mall for bargains - or watch football. How did our family spend Thanksgiving then? Slaving in the kitchen all day to put WAY too much food on the table. That tradition seems to be alive and thriving quite well :)

Way –Way too much food. This time I almost stopped before it got too painful. But before the first bite, I did ask to move the table, so that I wasn’t the only one who could not watch the game.Lovely- I got the warm fuzzies off the Norman Rockwell imagery, just as I inadvertently started to grit my teeth for my own rant.Somewhere someone figured out that if a modest percent of the holiday spending level would had been diverted to purchasing “ made in America products”, a number of jobs would be created that would had made the combined Campaign promises down right scrooge-like.Consciously choose to not purchase "Crap that will end up in the landfill...."? Let’s Google "holiday spending as an economic indicator". Sane personal spending, too revolutionary. The Guilt… The Guilt! (To the tune of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz)Irresponsible talk like that might plunge this country right over a cliff.Same looming Financial Cliff that would had magically dissipated had 2.5 million or a strategic lesser number translated into electoral votes.

It wasn't really all that long ago that the Christmas displays started going up before Thanksgiving.

Not too sure about the number of turkey sandwiches making it to be unwrapped by the ledge at the edge of the fountain down by the food courts this year, though.

If you check out the history of Christmas in this country, you'll see we've really changed our observations and the meaning of it all enormously over the years. And, clearly, we're still evolving our observation of both holidays as well, all while looking back over our shoulder at a vision that often really wasn't there.

Calhouns Can(n)ons

About the Can(n)ons

Calhoun's Can(n)ons was originally published in 1990 in the (now defunct) Morro Bay, CA, Sun Bulletin, and since 1992 has continued in the various resurrections of the Los Osos, CA. Bay News, Bay Breeze, Bay News, Bay News-Tolosa Press. A few years ago, the Can(n)on was added to the Central Coast NewsMission blogsite. Ann Calhoun lives in Los Osos. You can email her at Churadogs at gmail dot com

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